Contact Center
management often complains about absence and attrition in their centers, but
most don’t do anything about it. While technology is constantly changing and
the make-up and responsibilities of front-line personnel are evolving in a variety
of different ways, low employee morale and turnover are still the most pernicious
issues in many operations.

“According to The Call Center School, average
agent turnover rates globally are between 30% and 45%,” said Ron Davis, founder
and CEO of Tenacity, a tech
company that describes its main mission as ‘changing human behavior for the
better’. Businesses with 500 or more employees suffer from turnover
rates above 50% annually, with absence rates that are twice as high, combining
to cause a serious detraction in the bottom line.”

Customer-facing
personnel have always faced daunting challenges, but over the past few years,
the degree of difficulty has increased. Despite the broad availability of omni-channel
and self-service options, many customers are still unable to resolve issues to
their satisfaction. When they call the contact center, they’re
frustrated and impatient. Management expectations are high, with agents
required to build additional skills and adhere to the ever-more rigorous KPIs
demanded of them.

Traditional
approaches (skill training and coaching, rewards and recognition and advanced
workforce optimization technologies) have had little impact on helping agents
deal with stress. Agents who work at a contact center seldom have time to interact with their peers and at-home agents rarely communicate with their colleagues. This creates a feeling of isolation which often raises the stress level. Millennials, now the single largest segment of the US population, value connectedness, meaning, and social engagement which they view as critical factors impacting their quality of life.

Tenacity
has developed a retention-as-a-service (RaaS) platform combining cutting-edge
social science from MIT as well as stress management and resiliency best
practices to help businesses address these chronic obstacles to human
performance. When Davis, who graduated with honors from Harvard Law School,
took a class at the MIT Media Lab, he immediately saw the enormous potential of
the work they were doing. It involved a big data-driven new science called “social
physics” geared to shape organizations that are
cooperative, productive, and creative.

In seeking industrial sectors that had a pain point that
could benefit from the discipline, Davis noted “Contact Centers immediately
bubbled up to the surface.” He presented the proposition to a number of major
companies in the financial services and telecom areas who expressed enthusiasm, which encouraged him to move
forward.

Under
the direction of its science advisor, Professor Alex Pentland of MIT, Tenacity
has employed social physics to better understand the highly specific behaviors
of humans in group settings, and how this knowledge is used to influence individual and collective
behaviors to improve the functioning of such groups. For example, they have discovered
how to analyze communication metadata in a company to identify which teams are
going to be the most effective, a method that is more predictive than the
background or talent of the people on the team.

They
have also learned the value of offering ‘social rewards’ – as opposed to
traditional incentives – to change human behavior. One of the reward structures
Tenacity uses is called ‘peer rewards’. Rather than rewarding an individual for
good behaviors, the individual is paired with two buddies at work, and Tenacity
rewards the grouped team for those positive actions, as opposed to the
individual. When properly used, Davis says it can be seven times more effective
in altering behavior as the direct incentives.

Another
technique employed by Tenacity which both reduces stress and makes individuals
feel better about themselves, is the creation of weekly “Quests”. Quests
involve activities such as guided deep breathing, encouraging the completion of
daily fitness goals, and team building.

Canadian-based
Plasticity Labs is another company that takes a scientific approach to morale
issues. Coming from a different perspective, Plasticity Labs focuses on
improving organizational performance by measuring and training employee
happiness. According to co-founder and Chief Communications Officer Jennifer
Moss, their platform brings together positive, organizational, and social
psychology to help businesses understand employee sentiment, train
impactful behaviors, and build successful contact center operations.

“Our
solution employs a combination of neuroscience, cognitive behavioral science
and predictive analytics,” said Moss. Plasticity has created an ecosystem that
includes a survey engine that generates quarterly micro surveys to help businesses understand how engagement, performance,
satisfaction, and other KPI’s change over time. A social feed captures
the results of a daily Happiness Question and offers a Positive Focus that
keeps employee attention on the good things about their job, and prompts them
to record what they are grateful for each day. It also incorporates a learning
management system as well as analytics and reporting that enables management to
track employee morale and take action as a result of the feedback.

“Front-line
personnel are dealing with people who are stressed and angry and bring high
expectations to the table,” said Moss. “It is becoming more important for
companies to invest in employee happiness in order to keep them engaged and on
point.” The platform allows agent empathy and resiliency to be tracked and
mapped to KPIs, such as CSAT and NPS scores, and AHT reduction in escalations.

She
considers herself and her husband Jim, the co-founder and CEO of Plasticity, as
being “accidental entrepreneurs”. The company was founded in 2009, following a
serious injury that left Jim, an athlete who competed at the professional level
in hockey and lacrosse, paralyzed. “He walked out of the hospital in six months
when he was told he might never walk again,” she said. “The strength he found
in building his resiliency by creating gratitude journals led to the
development of an app, which in turn led to a company asking for a white label
version of our solution.”

Plasticity
and Tenacity both provide divergent science-based platforms to help contact
centers achieve reduced attrition, better employee morale, and improved
performance. Both solution providers rely
on identifying and cultivating internal champions within an organization to
create interest in their respective platforms. The two companies also engage in
pilot programs tying the continuation of their involvement to successful KPI
measurements, and both require a serious commitment from upper management, “We’ve
walked away from situations where we saw that people at the top weren’t willing
to give us their unqualified support,” said Davis. “Many companies are aware
that attrition is their biggest problem but they are unwilling to invest in
solutions to fix it.”

Beyond
executive buy-in, they must gain enthusiastic participation from the agent
population as well. Davis says that adoption rates for Tenacity start at about
70-75% and level off at 50-55%. They
integrate variables that prevent selection bias in determining the ongoing success
of users vs non-users of the program.

Both Plasticity
and Tenacity offer impressive success stories about their initial
implementations but know that they have much more to do to gain widespread
acceptance. The benefits of deploying strategies to reduce stress, diminish
isolation and harness happiness have long been endorsed by behavioral
scientists. If these solutions can consistently deliver measurable long-term
improvements to the chronic problems that have plagued operational
effectiveness for 30+ years, they could become “must-haves” in the contact
center community.